On raw numbers, this isn’t close. WordPress powers roughly 42-43% of all websites globally and roughly 60% of the CMS market. Drupal sits at under 1% of all websites, having declined steadily from a 2011 peak, largely squeezed out at the lower end by no-code website builders rather than by WordPress directly.

The picture changes considerably at the enterprise tier. Among the top 10,000 websites by traffic, Drupal’s share rises to 7.2%, while WordPress’s share among that same group falls to roughly 49%. Drupal was never trying to win the mass market; its declining overall share reflects lost ground among smaller sites that were never its target audience, while its position among large, complex, high-governance organisations has remained comparatively stable.

Worth flagging for anyone currently running Drupal is that Drupal 10 reaches end of life on 9 December 2026, making an upgrade to Drupal 11 a live consideration for existing Drupal sites this year, and a natural moment for some organisations to evaluate whether to migrate elsewhere entirely.

There’s no commercial licensing fee to factor in here, both WordPress and Drupal are free, open-source software at their core. The real cost differences show up in development complexity, hosting requirements, and ongoing maintenance overhead.
 

 
Costs vary significantly by project complexity and hosting provider; figures are indicative only.

This is Drupal’s clearest structural advantage, and the main reason it remains the platform of choice for governments, universities, and large regulated organisations. Its permissions system supports highly granular, role-based access down to individual content types and fields, and its native content moderation workflows let organisations define exactly how content moves from draft through review to publication across multiple departments.

Drupal’s multi-site architecture is also genuinely native: a single Drupal codebase can power dozens or hundreds of related sites (common in university department networks, for example) sharing core functionality while maintaining independent content and, where needed, independent governance.

WordPress Multisite offers comparable functionality for running several sites from one installation, and role and capability management has improved significantly over the years, particularly with plugins purpose-built for enterprise permission structures. But this is an area where WordPress’s plugin-driven approach shows its limits most clearly: achieving Drupal’s level of native, fine-grained governance on WordPress usually means assembling and maintaining several specialist plugins working together, rather than configuring capability that’s built into the platform from the start.

For organisations where audit trails, departmental separation, and formal publication workflows are a hard requirement rather than a nice-to-have, Drupal’s governance model remains genuinely difficult to match.

WordPress’s SEO plugin ecosystem, led by tools like Yoast SEO or Rank Math gives editorial teams accessible, largely code-free control over metadata, schema, and site structure. For content teams who want to manage SEO themselves without developer involvement, that accessibility is a genuine advantage.

Drupal’s SEO capabilities are strong at a technical level, contributed modules cover metadata, XML sitemaps, and URL structure comprehensively, and Drupal’s taxonomy system lends itself naturally to well-organised, crawlable content architecture on large sites. What it lacks is WordPress’s single dominant, polished SEO plugin experience; Drupal’s SEO tooling tends to be more modular and more reliant on developer configuration to get right.

For large, multi-department sites specifically, Drupal’s structured content and taxonomy strengths can pay off in cleaner information architecture at scale, which matters for SEO on sites with genuinely large content volumes. For editorial teams who want to self-manage SEO without ongoing developer input, WordPress remains the more accessible option.

Security is one of the more data-backed differences in this comparison. In Sucuri’s 2024 website hacking analysis, Drupal accounted for just 0.4% of compromised sites analysed, notably below its market share, while WordPress plugin vulnerabilities have consistently accounted for the majority of reported WordPress security incidents, with core WordPress itself rarely the point of compromise.

Drupal’s security strength comes from how the platform is governed rather than any inherent technical superiority. Its dedicated Security Team reviews contributed modules, coordinates disclosure, and publishes security advisories on a predictable, formal schedule. Drupal’s configuration-as-code approach, where site configuration is exported, versioned, and deployed through proper pipelines, also aligns naturally with the kind of DevOps and audit practices security-conscious organisations already expect.

WordPress core security is genuinely solid and backed by an active security team of its own. The real exposure comes from WordPress’s scale and openness: with over 59,000 free plugins built by independent developers of wildly varying skill and maintenance commitment, a poorly maintained plugin stack remains the single most common route to compromise on WordPress sites, a manageable risk with disciplined plugin hygiene, but a real one at scale.

For organisations with formal compliance or audit requirements, Drupal’s governance-first approach to security is a genuine structural advantage. For most standard business websites, a well-maintained WordPress site with a lean plugin stack is entirely secure in practice.

 
This comparison tends to resolve itself once you’re honest about scale and governance. If your organisation genuinely needs the kind of formal, multi-department permission structures and audit trails Drupal builds in natively, that need doesn’t go away simply because WordPress is cheaper to start with. If it doesn’t, WordPress will very likely get you to the same outcome faster and for considerably less.

Whether you need a fast, cost-effective WordPress build or you’re weighing up whether your governance requirements genuinely call for a platform like Drupal, we can help you make the right call, and build it properly once you do.